Selling Your Home

Fire Waiting to Happen

This post is about solid fuel burning appliances and potential chimney fires.  Solid fuel appliances are usually wood burning fireplaces or stoves, including inserts.  The chimney serving these appliances should be cleaned every year.  The picture below shows a chimney with major creosote buildup.  The very next fire in the stove could be the one to set off a chimney fire; and chimney fires often burn houses down!

 

 

Composition Siding: LP and others

There has been a lot of controversy regarding composition wood fiber siding. Many brands of this type of siding by different manufacturers are known to deteriorate and/or fail prematurely due to moisture penetration. Failure is typically visible in the form of swelling, cracking and delamination, especially at the bottom edges. Class action lawsuits have been filed or are being filed against most manufacturers of this material. 

 

The following photos show siding in the early stages of this deterioration.  These can all be treated with the “Permanizer Plus” product.  The important thing to note if you happen to won a house with this type siding is that regular maintenance is absolutely necessary.  If you are buying a house with this siding, be sure that your inspector looks long and hard at the condition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following photo shows LP siding inentification.  You have to look closely.  The knot in the pattern shows an L and  P in the creases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pittsburgh Paints, PRIMERS -THE FOUNDATION FOR A TOP QUALITY JOB
Failing LP Siding Help Page

Thanks for reading.

David Helm, Bellingham home inspector

http://www.helmhomeinspections.com  

Short Sales, What They mean to Your Credit as a Seller

Short Sales have been made to seem like a really good thing. They help the seller out of a financial bind. They enable a Buyer to get a good deal on a home. They enable Realtors to sell a home that would otherwise not be saleable. A short sale even gets a bad loan off of a bank’s books. This all sounds really good and I believe that it is. There has been something left out of the equation though.

What does this do to the seller’s credit rating? In all of the articles, blogs and press releases that I have read the subject has not come up. Why is this? I am not in a position to say. I can let you know what it does to a seller’s credit. A Short sale shows up as a foreclosure. I have been told by many that a Short sale is not as bad as a foreclosure.

This is true in a moral sense. A short sale allows a home owner to take the high road. To do the job of the banks REO department in helping to dispose of a troubled asset. As for the Sellers ability to get a loan after taking this “High Road”. They will have a foreclosure on their credit report and will have to wait a minimum of 2 years before another lender will talk to them about getting a new home mortgage. If you look you will find that there are some lenders who are making exceptions to this rule.

So why not just let it go to foreclosure? Because we are “Americans” and want to do the right thing! So how about just toughing it out by making the payments even if they hurt? I understand that many people are in positions which make this option impossible. There are many that are going the short sale route as an easy out. You can stop making payments on your home. Live there for free. Why not everyone else is? When and if the home does sell the lien holder will eat the cost of carrying the house during the sale period because the Seller is doing the right thing.

I hope that you have found this blog thought provoking. I applaud those who are genuinely trying to do the right thing by helping the owner of the mortgage loan get out with a smaller loss than they would have realized if the home where to go through a traditional foreclosure. To those of you who are in a genuine bind due to loss of income or value in your home and those who got swindled into a bad loan with increasing payments, I offer my condolences. In this case I would recommend that you talk to a Realtor who specialises in distressed properties. You will find their assistance to be quite valuable.

Sincerely, Jack

What is a Short Sale?

Everyone’s talking about this new phenonemum called the Short Sale.  What is it you ask?  A short sale in real estate is not always a pleasant transaction.  In times of declining home values, a homeowner can be caught in a position of negative appreciation.  In other words, the current market value of the home is less than what is owed to the bank.  This causes a problem if the homeowner experiences a hardship such as loss of work, or if he/she needs to relocate for any reason.

At this point the homeowner has 4 options available to him/her: 
 

• Continue making payments until market conditions improve to sell the home.
• Do a Deed in lieu of foreclosure.  Give the keys back to the bank and walk away.
• Quit making payments and allow the home to be foreclosed on by the bank.
• Do a Short Sale

A Short Sale is when the homeowner procures a buyer that is willing and able to purchase at a price less than what is owed to the bank.  Next you have to get the bank to agree to take this lesser (or short) amount.  This is where having a trained professional on your side makes all the difference.  The bank won’t want to let you off the hook too easily, and not without plenty of proper documentation. 

As a Real Estate agent, I am not licensed as a lawyer nor a CPA and cannot advise on those consequences. Except for certain conditions pursuant to the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007, be aware the I.R.S. could consider debt forgiveness as income, and there is no guarantee that a lender who accepts a short sale will not legally pursue a borrower for the difference between the amount owed and the amount paid. In some states, this amount is known as a deficiency. A Real Estate lawyer can determine whether your loan qualifies for a deficiency judgment or claim.

If you are considering purchasing a property listed as a Short Sale, I can offer you some advice and strategy.  With a little patience, the upside in many cases is getting the Home you want for less than market value.

Call me…let’s talk Real Estate,

Dale Kreiser 360-319-6365

Insurance 101-The Learning Curve Series: Renters Insurance

Why this topic on a Real Estate Web Page? It is important to know that either while waiting to purchase a home or if you sell your home and you are in flux to get another home you still have insurance needs.

A Renters Insurance policy is a Contents and Liability policy that provides Valuable protection. Look up Home Insurance in this series and think about Renters Insurance as a Home Insurance policy without the home.

What Does Green Really Mean?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while.  There is a lot of hoopla regarding green building and green lifestyle these days.  There are certainly many levels of greenness and I applaud you for whatever level you have reached.  Unfortunately, being truly green is a lot more complex than it might seem on the surface. 

Let’s start with transportation.  When we think of green, we need to take into consideration the carbon footprint for sure, but we also need to take into consideration the use of resources (after all, we do live in a finite world) and how long will it take that new green product to become a net gain for the environment.   You buy a new Prius.  This is very green because it gets very high mileage.  Not green immediately.  How much steel, oil (including all the plastics) and polution was used/caused in its manufacture?  How much oil was used in shipping it to the USA and then to your town?  Compare this with a ten year old high mileage vehicle  (since emission standards have not improved in this time I will not talk about that).  The manufacturing costs (polution, resource use) have nearly been amortized.  In the beginning, at least, the ten year old vehicle will be greener than the new Prius.  How long will it take the Prius to catch up? In this blog I’ll not talk about public transportation because the nature of most of our work requires private transportation (there is probably very little green about private transportation).

Food use and production; where does your food come from?  Is it shipped halfway around the world?  Is it a result of industrial monoculture farming (relying heavily on oil for fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and harvesting)?  Truly green food is both local and seasonal. We eat what is produced in our local area, when it is produced.  If you want it to be green, you also have to take into consideration the treatment of the land and animals that you eat.  If the land is being despoiled with petroleum based chemicals, if the animals are treated as production units (feed lots, cages, etc.) it is not green.  Even if it is organic, if it’s shipped from far off, it’s not green.

Local economies; A green economy is one that is sustaining of the locality.  If your buying your goods and services from the big box stores/national or international chains, you are not sustaining your local economy.  This is not green.  Buying local circulates the money locally.  Buying from chains sends the money somewhere else. 

What is a truly green house?  The analogy written above about the Prius fits here too.  Can we find truly sustainable wood products?  Not with todays knowledge.  There are certainly some small, local mills and timber operations that strive to do sustainability, but on a national level it is pretty grim.  Building to LEEDS standards is certainly a large step in the right direction, but is only a step. Where do the materials and products for future housing come from?  What is the carbon/resource footprint of future housing?

This post is not meant as a pooh poohing of green building and practices.  It is only meant as a thought provoker.  I am thrilled that our industry is beginning to take these things into consideration, and I know that all of us fit somewhere in the continuum of green; either not green, partially green, predominately green (I doubt that there is anyone in this country that is 100% green; we do, after all, live in an industrial society).

Thanks for reading this screed.  I hope it provokes thought and action. 

REDUCE; REUSE; RECYCLE

David Helm, Bellingham home inspector

http://www.helmhomeinspections.com

REALTORSPEAK; A Dictionary

First a disclaimer.  This is all in jest and is not meant to offend anyone.  I spend a lot of time looking at listings, because I am a very small time RE investor.  I always get a kick out of the adjectives used to describe homes in these listings.  The following are some of my definitions.

ELEGANT   You can’t afford it!

FABULOUS    See ELEGANT

DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL  Bring a bulldozer!

CHARMER   Old and in the way!

LUXURIOUS    See ELEGANT

PRIVATE LOCATION    You can’t get there from here!

REMODELED    A few upgrades done twenty years ago!

FIXER or FIXER UPPER    See DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL

HISTORIC    See ELEGANT

CUTE    Your family won’t fit in this one!

STARTER HOME    See DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL

NEWER    At least thirty years old!

CLASSIC    See CHARMER

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH    See DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL

VINTAGE    See Charmer

These are a few of the terms I’ve discovered.  I know there are more.  Feel free to add any you’d like.

Thanks for looking

David Helm, Bellingham home inspector

www.helmhomeinspections.com